Saturday, June 4, 2011

Plus, I Can't Find My Bloody Sunglasses ANYWHERE

In years to come we will speak of “our little April drought” and “a sun aglow with the radiance of a prince’s baubles” as we scroll through screen after screen of whited-out megapixel memories.

But hasn’t it been chilly with it?

With every splash of sun has come a snap breeze — whooshing from under bluebell and around bud, then up between your legs like a born again gooser with Edward Scissorhands hands (only instead of scissors, they’re white chocolate Magnum ice creams. And maybe it’s Francis Rossi.)

One minute, you’re (like) Let’s take a gentle stroll to the greenhouse in this uncanny Spring heat, let’s bathe in the warmth of the sun like some weird kind of human basking reptile — then the next you’re (even more like) For fuck’s sake! Has a miniature intergalactic freight cruiser of liquid Nitrogen just nosedived into my bum crack? No, waitaminute it’s just some weird-looking guy with Mr Whippy’s top-of-the-range merchandise glued to his wrists as if by Glacerie Magicke!

But not this last week, not since May became June — and thoughts turned to tennis and nightmare vacation shark attacks.

Since Monday, I’ve been blissfully able to stroll to my greenhouse free from rectal peck of chilly gusts. Shorts have been donned, and with them, the gait of a cool dude surfer boy in full Languish Mode, swigging from a can of kerray-zee Ginseng nonsense drink, with a hippyesque girl on his arm and his surfboard slung from his inner thighs in a harness arrangement because he’s run out of free hands c/o the chick and the drink and his backpack is locked away in his sun-drenched ole VW (and would have been useless anyway on account of his board being ten feet long and he a midget).

I realise now I should have eased myself into this Summery arrangement more gradually — potted a red and then a yellow and then a another red instead of tipping up the whole snooker table and having done with in a flurry of balls.

For the frosty clench of a gust-shocked backside is as naught in the agony stakes compared to torment’s blistered red leather carapace screeching DIE! DIE! DIE! from my shoulders.

I’ve rubbed my scorched wound with numerous healing unctions and balms — including a whole bottle of Girly of Whirly’s Opium and a chunk of Extra Mild Cheddar — but I can’t bear the touch of anything resembling clothing. It’s like the skin of a burned roast chicken: hard and crusty and cracked and liable to slip right off the sinew from the merest prod.

All of which makes walking Geoff’s ghost round the neighbourhood something of a potential embarrassment. For years she had a special Cat Lead we were told “cats love”, complete with instructions of how to coerce her into wearing it without breaking her neck or courting imprisonment. She was never a walky kind of cat, so until she died the lead lay idle in a box in the scullery along with an Alan Titchmarsh hallowe’en mask and job lot of laxatives I won in a pub quiz in 1988. I have to tell you, walking a dead cat’s spectre round the place is a difficult enough business without looking like a suicidal maniac dragged from a pyre. As the cat lead’s chain chinks along the pavement just inches from where my faith in the afterlife keeps it soundlessly aloft, some fat kid or some bony old git or some dog-walking harridan will come bounding round the corner, instantly expressing with their faces a sense of wonder-cum-rudely-probing-bemusement as to whether I lost my cat in a house fire despite a brilliant rescue attempt or burned it to death to save putting my back out burying it alive and got unlucky with the petrol. You try mustering an apologetic shrug under these circumstances.

Until the soreness dies down and I can construct a wheeled feline doll to trundle along behind me, the best I can hope for at the moment is an encounter with Mr Do Something. If anyone has a selection of bizarre cream in his medicine cabinet, it’s him.

Not that it matters. Back when I was a wee goblin, Solarcaine made your skin as numb as the dentist's needle. Nowadays, it merely dulls the sunburn's agony until you actually brush against something, and then you're right back to whimpering and weeping.

Yeah, thanks for that, Whirl. I've lost all desire for a white-chocolate Magnum now, and I will also never open my legs again.Anybody know a seller of heated, insulated chastity belts?

Re: the sunburn; don't they do Noxema over there? A bath in cold water is also good, or just a wet towel kept in the fridge with a second one to swap out when it gets too warm.

This might be a good time to take up plein air drawing; you will not have the usual problem of people coming close to you to gawk over your shoulder because you will not have the problem of people coming close to you. Geoff is amused.

Writing contest.......My blog Amish Stories is having its first ever contest this week. The First prize winner will win 2 tickets to tour the farm where the 1985 move "Witness" staring Harrison Ford and Kelly Mcgillis was made in Strasburg,Pa . This farm is now Amish owned, and the family has given permission for folks to tour their farm. This may be the last time anyone will be able to walk and see the same things that Harrison Ford and the other actors saw during the making of "Witness". The Witness tour should last about 2.5 hours. In addition to the Witness farm tour tickets, 1st prize winner will also receive 2 tickets for Jacobs choice. There will also be a 2nd place prize, which will be 2 tickets for the Amish Homestead. Please go to My blog www.AmishStorys.com for contest details, and more information on the prizes. Richard from the Amish settlement of Lebanon county.